The Manila Jai Alai Building was a building designed by American architect Welton Becket that functioned as a building for which jai alai games were held. Built to the Streamline Moderne style, the building was completed in 1940 and survived the Battle of Manila. It was demolished on 2000 upon the orders of the Mayor of Manila Lito Atienza amidst protests, to make way for the Manila Hall of Justice, which was never built.
Source:wikipedia

How about Chinese cities? Are they trying to preserve the old towns or are they also slowlyy disappearing?

Almost all of China's great cities were destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion (the worlds second deadliest ever war, over 30 million died) during the 19th Century. More devastation followed in the end of the Qing Dynasty (temples and palaces in Beijing went from 3000 in 1900 to 300 in 1930), WWII, the Civil War, the Cultural Revolution, and the latest wave of demolition, the economic rise and spectacular population growth of the cities since 1990. Its a wonder anything older than a hundred years stands to this day. Although many major monuments have somehow survived or been restored, many of the Old City districts have long gone - but watch this space, Beijing and Xian are rebuilding theirs from scratch using old maps and photos, while Shanghai, Suzhou and Chongqing are restoring thousands of old streets.

There are also tentative plans to rebuild the Old Summer Palace (+worlds largest gardens) in Beijing, destroyed by Western troops in 1860 and again in 1900, and the City Walls, once the worlds greatest, that were bulldozed to make way for a ringroad and subway in the 1950s.

The Old Summer Palace would be one of the wonders of the world if it were extant today, hundreds of pavilions and palaces on islands in myriad lakes. So big it took 3 days to burn and loot:

Beijing's City walls were 24 km long, 60ft thick at the base and 50ft high. The watchtowers and gates were castle sized:

Modernist architecture was once called the greatest crime against beauty in human history, and looking at this thread it's quite impossible to disagree. Countless pleasing, sensibly-built buildings replaced by what can only be described as garbage. It's a cautionary tale that is somehow not heeded by today's architects and planners.

As Orwell said of ideas and intellectuals, there are some buildings so stupid that only modernists enjoy them.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Suburbanist

It is less about tearing something down than what you could build instead.

The mere fact that you only attempt to justify what was built on the grounds of abstract principle proves the futility, and ultimate meaninglessness, of your position. Well done on illustrating for us the absurdity of modernist argumentation.

Perhaps this example was already posted, but here's the old Marion County Courthouse of Indiana:

Sorry, mate, photo-wars don't cut it to me. I HATE the excessive ornamentation of medium/late 19th Century European classical revival. Too much information, too much details.

I'm a big fan of things that are done on monumental scale, that reduces human beings outside a building to insignificance and that portray an architectonic language that resembles neatness, open plans, vast spaces, endlessly and transiency.

__________________"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.."

Last edited by Suburbanist; May 11th, 2012 at 03:35 PM.
Reason: typo :/

Sorry, mate, photo-wars don't cut it to me. I HATE the excessive ornamentation of medium/late 19th Century European classical revival. Too much information, too much details.

Hating things with "too much information": the calling card of the vacuous and vapid.

Hating things with "too much detail [read: sophistication]": the calling card of the crass and uncultured.

You want the architectural equivalent of gruel. Everyone else wants a five-course meal.

Quote:

I'm a big fun of things that are done on monumental scale, that reduces human beings outside a building to insignificance and that portray an architectonic language that resembles neatness, open plans, vast spaces, endlessly and transiency.

Once again you so ably illustrate the basic absurdity of your ideology: modernism seeks to reduce human beings to insignificance because modernism actively disregards the human condition. Humans, for the modernist, are merely annoying inconveniences. What modernists fail to realize is that in reality their creations, not human beings, are precisely that.

PS, "photo-wars" don't cut it with you because you know you'll lose every single time.

__________________The principles discoverable in the works of the past belong to us; not so the results. It is taking the end for the means. - Owen Jones

Maybe. But I despise traditional human aesthetics in favor of a whole new aesthetic paradigm that values the achievements of industry, engineering and what else. I don't want to be entertained by ornate walls or fractalized windows of a building, I want to be impressed, overwhelmed and shocked by something that reminds me how humans without technology are nothing much more than wasted potential.

That is probably why brutalism is my all-time favor genre, likely. But I'll save that for other thread.

__________________"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.."